The longest-running public service announcement in the U.S. turns 80 years old today.

Its message is simple and one you’ve heard many times before: “Only you can prevent wildfires.” Smokey Bear, the beloved park ranger hat-wearing black bear who utters these famous words has undergone a complicated evolution.

And his birthday comes as fires rage in California, Colorado and other Western states. On average, some 70,000 wildfires have been documented every year in the U.S. since 1983, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.

Human-caused climate change has made these fires more intense and dangerous, but it isn’t the only factor: Federal data and various independent studies show that around 80% of all wildfires in the country are caused by humans, making Smokey’s message more relevant than ever.

So we’re taking a look back at how Smokey Bear’s mission came to be and how effective his messaging has been.

How World War II influenced Smokey Bear’s creation

Fire burns near a Smokey the Bear fire warning sign as the Oak Fire burns through the area on July 24, 2022 near Jerseydale, California.

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Smokey Bear’s public service ad was created at the height of World War II in 1944. The U.S. Forest Service had been fighting forest fires for years, but the attack on Pearl Harbor brought a greater need for fire safety messaging, as firefighters were deployed overseas.

“When this campaign first launched, it was in the context of our war efforts, and the forests were seen as a resource in that context,” said Tracy Danicich, director of the Smokey Bear campaign at the Ad Council.

A few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, a Japanese submarine sitting off the coast fired shells at an oil facility in Santa Barbara County, Calif. south of the Los Padres National Forest. The attack raised fears that more attacks like this could cause wildfires in forests along the Pacific coast. The Forest Service hoped that connecting the risk of fires to the war effort would help make the case for fighting forest fires more urgent.

“There was also a rise in wildfires just from general human carelessness, lack of respect for fire, perhaps lack of knowledge of how to contain and properly respect a fire,” said Tad Bennicoff, a reference archivist at the Smithsonian Institution archives. “So the Forest Service came up with the idea of the Smokey Bear character and the message.”

But even after World War II ended, Smokey stuck around. He started showing up on posters, U.S. Postal Service stamps, in radio ads and alongside stars like Bing Crosby and Ward Bond.

You might remember calling the forest fire fighting black bear “Smokey the Bear,” but that isn’t actually his name.

In 1952, singers Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins wrote a jingle for and added a “the” to maintain the song’s rhythm. This inadvertently created confusion about the bear’s name, but the U.S. Forest Service maintains that Smokey’s official name is “Smokey Bear,” not “Smokey the Bear.”

The campaign’s mascot was an actual bear rescued from a wildfire

The Smokey Bear balloon floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday, Nov. 25, 2021, in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

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In the spring of 1950, a group of Native American firefighters rescued a bear cub who clung to a tree as a fire raged in the Capitan Mountains in New Mexico.

After its rescue, the cub became the symbol of the Smokey Bear campaign and was put on display at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

But the physical public service announcements, which for years showed a black bear in a pair of blue pants, a tan wide-brimmed park ranger’s hat and a metal shovel, confused some zoo goers.

Bennicoff said this outfit was so closely associated with Smokey that some young kids were bewildered when they saw a naked bear at the National Zoo.

Visitors were startled to see a real bear, Bennicoff said. “They were expecting to see the Smokey Bear that they saw in print ads and on television. But lo and behold, there’s this actual bear.”

Forest Service cartoon of Smokey Bear welcoming Little Smokey./Smithsonian Institution Archives

To help with the confusion, the zoo added a special exhibit next to Smokey’s enclosure that featured a park ranger’s uniform in Smokey’s size. During this time, Smokey Bear was receiving so much fan mail that the Zoo had to hire three assistants to keep up with the amount of letters he was getting. He even got his own ZIP code — an honor only bestowed to one other figure: the president.

Smokey retired from the zoo at 25. In human years, he would have been roughly 70, the mandatory retirement age for federal employees at the time. In 1971, the zoo introduced “Little Smokey,” another orphan cub rescued by the Forest Service. When Smokey retired, Little Smokey took over the mantle.

The original Smokey died Nov. 9,1976, a year after his retirement. His remains were returned to New Mexico, where he was buried in the Smokey Bear Historical Park in Capitan, N.M., not far from where he was rescued two decades prior.

A small change for Smokey represents a big change for environmentalism

Wild mustard flowers bloom around a Smokey Bear sign in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, Thursday, June 8, 2023.

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For five decades, Smokey’s slogan remained the same: “Only you can prevent forest fires.” The message suggested that all fires were preventable and bad for the environment and that nature could return to its original state if fires didn’t occur.

In one ad, Smokey said that if people just took his message into their hearts, it could be like “the old times, maybe, when great herds of buffalo roamed.“

Melinda Adams, an Indigenous fire scientist and assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science at the University of Kansas told Morning Edition that Smokey’s vision of an America without wildfires isn’t accurate.

“When you had colonizers come over and look at land, mosaics or beautiful landscapes, they developed a narrative of [these] being untouched by humans, virgin lands. They arrived and the lands were like that,” Adams said. “But we know through the recent scholarship that that’s not true. We know that Indigenous peoples created these landscapes or maintained them.”

Adams is a proponent of what she calls good fire — or burns to land that help an environment thrive. This practice is also called prescribed burning.

This is one of the reasons that in 2001, Smokey Bear changed his slogan from only you can prevent forest fires to only you can prevent wildfires. This change in messaging also represented a change in how the U.S. Forest Service approached fire treatment.

“Now, the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S Department of Agriculture are redirecting resources to good fire, beneficial fire during the off fire season in order to reduce the overgrowth that, you know, decades of fire suppression of fire deficiency has left, which makes those areas of lands more flammable,” Adams said.

The road ahead for Smokey

A Smokey the Bear forest fire prevention sign stands in front of snow blanketing the Sierra Nevada mountains after recent storms increased the snowpack on February 23, 2024 near Bishop, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

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Most wildfires are still caused by human activity, which raises the question: Has Smokey’s messaging actually been effective?

John Miller, the chief of Fire and Emergency Response at the Virginia Department of Forestry, said that there is still a lot of work to be done to educate the public on fire safety.

It’s not enough, Miller said, for officials who work in fire prevention education to stand “with [their] arm around Smokey Bear shouting fire prevention on an occasional TV commercial or at a school near you or at a county fair with a booth. Somehow we need to turn that prevention into more to be more front and center to the public.”

Miller believes that one of the big problems is that people are not aware of smaller fires that occur in areas like Virginia all the time.

“Thankfully, because of quick and efficient suppression those fire hours are suppressed quickly. They don’t become newsworthy,” Miller said. “If it hadn’t impacted a home or damaged the public just never hears about that.”

Miller thinks these smaller fires can be prevented, especially because they are often caused by humans who are not aware of simple ways they can be practicing fire safety.

Which is exactly what Smokey Bear’s evolving message is — the best way to continue to spread awareness about safe fires.

“His tips evolve, and there are other things about Smokey and the campaign that have evolved to stay relevant, but that message and focus has always remained consistent,” Danicich said.

This digital story was edited by Obed Manuel.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to online uproar factory we go. The first teaser trailer for the upcoming live-action remake of Disney’s Snow White is here.

Starring Rachel Zegler as Snow White and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, the pair introduced the highly anticipated teaser at Disney’s D23 Expo Friday evening, with a release scheduled for March 21, 2025. Featuring first glimpses of Zegler singing “Whistle While You Work” and Gadot talking to her mirror, mirror, the trailer also showcased seven CGI dwarfs.

Written by Greta Gerwig (Barbie) and Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train) and directed by Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer, The Amazing Spider-Man), the people behind the film have emphasized that this latest adaptation features several ‘modern’ twists, alongside new songs from the duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen, The Greatest Showman).

Could this update to the 1937 classic be the — erm — fairest of them all? It may be a tough sell for Disney fans and other extremely online critics, whose scrutiny of the latest adaptation began years before today’s trailer drop.

Here is a brief overview of their grievances, explained.

A Snow White who’s not white enough

When news broke in 2021 that Zegler, who had her breakout role as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, would be playing the titular character, it provoked a string of racist comments on social media. People questioned why an actress of Latin descent would be playing a character with “skin white as snow.”

Zegler, who is of Polish-Colombian background, responded to the comments on X by saying she didn’t want to be dragged into the “nonsensical discourse”about her casting.

“I really, truly do not want to see it,” Zegler wrote in a post that included photos of her as a child dressed as a princess. “I hope every child knows they can be a princess no matter what.”

A reimagination deemed too “woke” by some critics

In another interview with Variety in 2022, Zegler and Gadot talked about how the story of Snow White was being adapted with a “modern edge” — one that would nix the part about Snow White being saved by a prince.

“She’s the proactive one,” Gadot said. “She’s the one who sets the terms. It’s [these factors] that make it so relevant to today.”

“She’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be, and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true,” Zegler said.

In another interview, Zegler referred to the prince as a “stalker” and said the messaging would be updated to reference a woman’s power in the modern world.

“The cartoon was made 85 years ago, and therefore it’s extremely dated when it comes to ideas of women being in roles of power and what a woman is fit for in the world,” Zegler said. “So, when we came to reimagining the actual role of Snow White, it became about the ‘fairest of them all’ meaning who is the most just and who can become a fantastic leader, and the reality is Snow White has to learn a lot of lessons about coming in to her own power before she can come into power over a kingdom.”

The comments provoked a wave of backlash on social media, notably from “anti-woke” accounts and from several conservative media outlets including the Daily Wire, which responded by saying it was producing its own version of the classic that would be written “in line with the values in which it was written.”

Others, like TikTok user @reubenwoodall, criticized Disney’s attempt to turn Snow White into a “girl boss.”

“The point of Snow White’s fairytale isn’t that she’s going to try and become a leader,” Woodall said in a video that amassed more than 1.3 million likes. “She’s not supposed to be this girl boss, leader, queen, feminist icon. And I don’t know why every reimagining, it has to be that the woman is in a position of power, otherwise it’s not feminist.”

In an interview with the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph in 2023, David Hand — the son of the 1937 animation’s original director — told the paper he felt it was a “disgrace” that Disney was “trying to do something new with something that was such a great success earlier.”

“There’s no respect for what Disney did and what my dad did … I think Walt [Disney] and he would be turning in their graves,” Hand said.

A “backward” story about seven dwarfs

In a 2022 interview, the actor Peter Dinklage criticized Disney over its plan to release the live-action remake, stating he was “taken aback” by the studio’s celebration of casting Zegler as a Latina lead while revisiting a story with an unflattering representation of dwarfs.

“It makes no sense to me. You’re progressive in one way and you’re still making that f—ing backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together, what the f— are you doing, man?” said Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, during an interview on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast.

Dinklage’s comments prompted Disney to release a statement saying it had decided to take a “different approach” with the seven character. “To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we … have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community,” a Disney spokesperson told Variety.